Colour traditional tattoo of a lion's head with a flowing orange and yellow mane on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion head on the back of the neck

Traditional · Neck · Colour · Photo

A large lion's head fills the back of the neck, facing forward with a full mane drawn in sweeping strands. Bold black outlines define the features, and the mane is shaded in orange, yellow and red with touches of blue on the brow and nose. The design is centred on the neck with the top of a dark-haired head above and bare skin with body hair below.

Traditional Neck Lion Lion head Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Snow had closed the lane by four o'clock, and Maud Ferrier had stopped counting the drifts against the coach house wall. The Red Lion's sign creaked on its iron bracket above the porch, the painted beast's mane gone the colour of old rust where the weather had got at it. She had meant to take it down before winter. Her father had always said a lion ought to face the road, even when there was no road left to face.

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The stranger came in just after the lamps were lit, stamping slush from his boots and setting a tin document case on the settle as though it might bite. He gave his name as Edwin Sallow, surveyor, and asked for a room with a fire in it. Maud gave him the room over the taproom, the one that kept its warmth from the chimney stack. He paid in coins worn smooth as pebbles, and when he thanked her he kept looking past her shoulder at the window, where the sign was a dark shape swinging against the white.

Later, when the house had gone quiet, she found the case still open on the settle. Inside lay a map of the old Ashdown estate, its margins crowded with notes in brown ink, and in one corner a lion's head drawn with a fine nib, its mane hatched in orange wash and bright ochre. Beneath it he had written: the last one was shot the year the bridge fell. Maud read it twice, folded the map the way she had found it, and went to bed without waking him.

By morning the wind had dropped and the snow lay thick on the sign, filling the mane so the lion looked hooded and patient. Sallow was gone, his tracks already softening in the lane. She left the sign where it hung. Some things, she decided, were better kept by the weather than by a woman with a paintbrush.